Is it OK to allow users to query an OLTP SQL Server database with excel?

Posted by user169867 on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by user169867
Published on 2010-04-21T14:47:35Z Indexed on 2010/04/21 14:53 UTC
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excel

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I have a SQL Server 2005 database used by several applications.

Some users wish to query the database directly from excel. I can understand this, because it is a useful tool for adhoc queries and then getting the data in a format that's easily transmitted and manipulated by other users.

My question is: Does Excel (say 2003/2007) do its querying in a way that won't cause concurency issues?

Or is it done in such a way that a seperate datawarehouse database needs to be made to handle this scenario?

Thanks for any advise.

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